


the pythons and the limbs

by newsbypostcard



Series: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Hand Jobs, Identity, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, blanket winter soldier trauma warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 01:06:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9693011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: He breathes deep, involuntary, just to keep this smell in his memory: Steve's deodorant, sex, coffee brewing not far.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Змеи, таящиеся в ветвях](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15929696) by [fandom_Starbucks_Roles_TwoSexyMen_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandom_Starbucks_Roles_TwoSexyMen_2018/pseuds/fandom_Starbucks_Roles_TwoSexyMen_2018)



> Title is from the National, "Demons," I know, sorry.

  


Most mornings Bucky doesn't understand what he sees, when he sees Steve beside him.

It takes time. Everything takes so much fucking _time_ these days. He never has his bearings. It takes him way too long, blinking sleep out of his eyes, heart pounding as he lies in T'Challa's guestroom, to remember why he's here; to remember the things that happened to land him here. It's as though his psychology is still reluctant to let him be Bucky first and a vessel second -- as though _Bucky_ is still a program he needs to remember to run, when he wakes up each morning.

It takes him, without fail, nearly a minute to remember that he's free -- at least, in a manner of speaking. And for that time he believes, without fail, that Steve is a hallucination.

Or -- he believes Steve is a memory of some kind; one of those ones he's not supposed to remember. For a full minute each day, he believes he's entered that fugue state he slipped into every time one of his memories would fight to surface, from before he was the Asset. He believes that it couldn't be real, just the way he used to think of those memories as the same, and it might've been two years since Hydra had him but the programming still runs strong. 

This is one of the hardest things to explain. He doesn't bother to try. He just accepts that reality will crystallize for him, one way or another, and waits to decide whether Steve is real or not before he speaks. 

Here's the crux of it: Bucky knows that Steve looks at him and sees _Bucky_ , hears _Bucky_ \-- the same _Bucky_ Steve's trying to evoke every time he calls him by that name. Bucky knows this because he sees the same in Steve; brings forth just the same kind of nostalgia every time he says his name out loud. _Steve_ , who loved him. _Steve_ whom Bucky loved.

But unbeknownst to Steve, _Bucky_ \-- the Bucky Steve wants him to be -- is still just a nagging memory in the back of his mind: a concept he feels to be acting out, more than a complete person. He calls himself by that name, _Bucky,_ because it's the thing that lives in his mind that he is fondest of; it's the thing that makes him feel the most autonomy, the most content, the most alive. 

But it is an aspiration, more than a reality.

Steve says his name often. Bucky feels warmth every time he does, as though he's being paid a compliment.

Steve makes him feel warm a lot of the time. It feels like it used to, when he was Bucky without trying. Sometimes, it makes trying to be Bucky feel like no effort at all.

  


  


  


Steve calls it "dissociating," once, when he forgets that he's mincing his words. Bucky looks up at him, abrupt, and then away.

"It's a defense mechanism," Steve reminds him -- reading his discomfort, but not quite reading why.

"It's how they weaponized me." Bucky spoons coffee grounds too furiously into the filter, and imprecision is, at least, deeply human. That is a comfort to him when they spill across the counter.

"Maybe it was."

"It _was_."

"I'm not denying reality, Bucky." _Bucky_ again; relief sparks in Bucky's chest, welcome and irrational. "I'm saying I think it's possible that you're doing it on your own, for different reasons than they did it to you."

"You a fucking expert now?"

"No."

"You're not in my head. I'm saying it doesn't feel good."

"It doesn't need to feel good to constitute protection."

Bucky lets the coffee scoop fall out of his hand when he fumbles it; turns to look at Steve, palm laying flat against the counter for steadiness and purchase.

"I," he says, slowly, words clear and deep, "do not like forgetting who I am."

"Okay," Steve says, too attentive.

"Stop telling me it's good for me." He gestures at his chest, then shakily at his head; he can't figure out why he can't find the words he wants but then it's hard to breathe and his chin starts to waver. Emotion sneaks up on him sometimes. One of those things he went long enough without to still find strange. "It feels bad."

"Okay."

"It _feels bad_ ," he says again, suddenly desperate for Steve to understand every part of what he means. He wants Steve to understand how important it is to feel _anything_ ; how important it can be even to feel bad. It carves a little more out of his will to push on, every time he loses that again -- that _feeling_ \-- even just for a minute.

But Steve's empathy is steady in new ways, ways he's never seen before. Ways he doesn't remember from _Bucky,_ that he must have learned in the years since, in the years without him. 

Steve only blinks at him and steps around the counter. He gathers Bucky's fingers from its surface and brings them up to his mouth, expression never wavering from devotion.

"You always come back," Steve reminds him. "I'll be here when you do."

That's true. And it is a comfort, it's all a comfort: Steve's breath hot against his knuckles, even his steadiness, unfamiliar and imperfect. 

That warmth sparks in him again. Bucky shuts his eyes. "I shouldn't have to," he says, and pulls away. "Come back."

Steve doesn't say anything or move until Bucky's filled the coffee machine with water and flicked it on, and when Bucky looks back at him, he sees those sad blue eyes staring at him. He asks without words a thousand questions without answers.

"That's true," Steve grinds out, belated now that Bucky's eyes are on him.

Bucky feels a sequence of things, familiar and therefore comfortable: a hint of embarrassment that he should be so interesting to Steve as to warrant a look so prolonged; the low grind of desire, the kind he'd spent so many years shoving away before learning what it meant to act on it.

Bucky, _Bucky,_ looks to the floor, then off to some corner of the ceiling, brushing idly at where coffee grounds have dusted his shirt. He looks Steve in the eye and raises his chin, feigning confidence: maybe the only act he likes to put on, for how rooted it is in the past. "So what've we got today?"

Steve shakes his head, just a slight, his eyes falling to trace the line of his jaw, his neck. It's a gesture born of intimacy, unconscious in desire. "I had a new one for you."

"Had?"

"Thinking maybe we should--"

He stops. Bucky gives him a thin smile, artificial.

"Hold off?" he finishes for him.

"Yeah," says Steve, stepping around sheepishness and into defiance.

"No."

Steve nods. "Okay."

It's too easy, sometimes. Bucky turns to hide his wince. "What year we up to?"

"Thirty-six."

"Yeah?"

"I'd just moved in, you'd just quit your job at the pulp mill."

Bucky nods, not remembering. "Is it a good one?"

"I -- yeah. Yeah. I think of it."

"We didn't fuck until '37, that right?"

"That's right."

Bucky smirks at him, injecting a hint of mischief into it. "So it can't be that good."

Steve smiles. Bucky looks at him for long enough to see the slow blink of his eyes, like he's holding something back, and that's what does it; he sets the cereal box down on the counter and walks to where Steve's standing and pulls him down for the filthiest kiss he knows how to offer on short notice.

Steve stills, for a minute; inhales sharply through his nose, tension setting hard in his back and his shoulders in surprise. But there is that grind in his throat, there's the way his hands snake under Bucky's shirt, to rest against his back as he pulls him close in. There's the way Bucky's whole body strikes hot, feeling flooding him to every corner with an intensity he hadn't thought still possible.

Bucky'd had a comment lined up; he'd thought of something _Bucky_ might've said back in the day, something taunting and witty, but in the end he finds he feels too much. He's brought by the pull of his gut to let himself be turned and leaned against the counter by Steve's steady hand; to moan into his mouth when Steve's fingers brush beneath the waistband of his sweatpants.

"Oh, God," Bucky mutters when Steve wraps his hand around his cock; then again, unintentional, guttural, "oh, _God_ ," when Steve falls to his knees and tests the weight of him against his tongue. 

He looks up at Bucky like he needs permission, and Bucky has to remember how to breathe -- but there's nothing else about this that's hard to remember. This is so fucking familiar, feels like something so close to himself that he may as well never have forgotten -- he may as well have been exactly here, without interruption, standing in the kitchen he and Steve share, Steve looking up at him like he's the Earth and the moon and the stars combined.

With lips parted with helpless want, Bucky wends his fingers in Steve's hair and coaxes him forward, nodding, as though inviting him to wrap his lips the way he wants. The heat is goddamn incredible when he does, flooding within him as much as without. He rolls his eyes to the ceiling, canting his hips once, twice, fucking Steve's mouth at a pace that seems restrained but instead is born of necessity, given the ferocious burn of need seeming to leave his muscles weak.

"Oh," Bucky says, and here, feeling this, want and pleasure and _love_ , God help him, each one stacking on top of the other, feeding a storm he can't quite temper, he is the most present he ever is. "Oh," he says, and Steve presses his tongue to the underside of his dick, creating a tight, muscular heat that evokes the memory of something too long forgotten. "Oh, _Christ,_ " he says, and it's a sob, wretched and wonderful as heat collects in his balls, leaves him clutching at Steve's hair like he's the only safe harbour.

When he comes it's with heat rippling through every muscle of him, leaving tears piquing at his eyes and a sound wrenching out of his lungs. Steve's hands grip at Bucky's hips like he needs to swallow him down as much as Bucky needed to fuck into him.

Then Wakanda ebbs back into focus; leaves Bucky heaving for breath, fingers unclenching, flattening nervously at Steve's hair as though terrified he'd hurt him.

Steve only sets his forehead against Bucky's stomach, thumbs still pressing into his skin, breathing hard and needful. "Steve?" Bucky croaks; it sounds young to his ears, a concern age-old and genuine.

Steve tilts his head and looks at him, wordless and reverent, and Bucky finds he doesn't have words. He only runs his fingers through Steve's hair, stroking and kind, the way he knows Steve would want -- the way he knows Steve _does_ want.

Sometimes the bridge between the Bucky that was and the Bucky that is -- disappears. Maybe it's not such a coincidence that these moments tend to begin and end with Steve.

Bucky coaxes Steve to his feet. He wants to kiss him. Most of the time, he just wants to kiss him. It's tempting to overthink it, but from the way desire tends to overtake him without him ever once predicting, there's never a solution he can come to that isn't trumped by touch itself. Steve goes supplicant at the drop of a hat, but he's now got the gift of physical strength; there's no shake in it when Steve steps to his feet, when he leans against Bucky with the fullness of his form, hitching Bucky's pants back up around his hips as he goes, leaving Bucky free to clench his fingers back in Steve's hair and kiss him with an open mouth. Steve is soft with want, going where Bucky leads him, still large enough to leave Bucky feeling taken in the process; and soon Steve's hands lift Bucky easily off the ground and slide him, seated, onto the counter, hips sidling between his knees before he presses his cock against Bucky's leg, as if he wouldn't notice.

"Don't be stupid," Bucky mutters, pulling Steve forward with a fist in his shirt. He kisses him stupid as he undoes his belt, the button on his jeans with as much ease as he might've with two hands available. It's no time at all before Steve's pushing up into his hand even through his boxers when Bucky wraps his fingers around him and oh, Jesus, he's not just hard but fucking leaking, like sucking Bucky off had really done it for him.

But doesn't it always?

And from there it's always disastrously easy; all Bucky has to do is sit there, applying gentle pressures, too much and then not enough, while Steve holds one hand at his knee and the other at the back of his neck, forehead bent down. His breath comes hard but he's never as vocal as Bucky is; it's still enough, says enough. Steve's brow creases against Bucky's skin and his fingers dig a little tighter against his neck, and Bucky smiles, he can't help it; this is where he wants to be, the same way Steve always seems to want to be on his knees. Bucky wants to feel the stutter of his breath as his hips cant of their own accord, desperate and needful, until Bucky tightens his grip and flicks his wrist and strips a moan out of him at last.

It's not far from there for Steve to fall into shuddering ecstasy as he comes over himself and Bucky's hand; and Bucky swears to remember this, the next time he gets to wondering if Steve might be real, because he's getting hard again as he runs his thumb gentle over the slit of his cock just to feel how fucking wet he is. He swears to remember the way he makes him shiver; the way he presses his face to Bucky's shoulder for stability.

Bucky tries to think about something other than his cock. They've already lost a few days to sex, Steve out of avoidance and Bucky in desperation to feel like himself for as long as he can; but it won't do to lose day after day. He sets his lips to Steve's temple as Steve holds to him and breathes deep, involuntary, just to keep this smell in his memory: Steve's deodorant, sex, coffee brewing not far. 

"That enough of a delay for you?" Bucky asks him, helpless but to smile.

"Uh," Steve says. He straightens; blinks at Bucky, affection full and helpless on his face, before kissing Bucky's right eyelid, then his left. "Guess so."

And Bucky had thought of something to say, he had, but he finds it's lost when he opens his mouth; only curls his fingers against the back of Steve's neck to hold onto this feeling another minute.

Just another minute.

So he has something new to remember, the next time he gets lost.

  



End file.
